UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

The (Human) Rights of Nature: A Comparative Study of Emerging Legal Rights for Rivers and Lakes in the United States of America and Mexico

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.31235/osf.io/e5npr

Authors

Elizabeth Macpherson

Reported year

2021

Reported language

en

Source type

preprint

First detected

2026-11-09T19:04:47.523003+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-10T16:58:51.488431+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

University of Canterbury

Reported affiliation countries

NZ

Documentary abstract — original language

An international consensus of scientific experts is now demanding "immediate action" in response to the environmental, climate, and biodiversity crises. But are our legal and regulatory frameworks equipped to respond to the rapid pace of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change? What incidence is there, transnationally, of laws that seek to protect the Earth from the humans that inhabit it? In the past few decades, there is a growing social, legal, and political movement towards more ecocentric regulation of the planet, where new laws and institutions seek to protect natural resources for their own intrinsic value. In this paper, I consider recent efforts to protect the rights of rivers in the U.S. and Mexico, which are novel and emerging attempts to discover new pathways for enhanced protection of vulnerable waterways. These attempts are being pragmatically driven from the bottom up to the highest levels of the legislature or judiciary as local communities (and sometimes Indigenous Peoples) become increasingly frustrated with apathetic and complacent governmental responses to environmental challenges, using whatever legal tools and processes are available to them. However, rather than an Earth-centred revolution, efforts to protect the rights of nature are distinctly "human"; as communities appeal to human rights laws, and their enhanced constitutional status, to upset the status quo. There are important lessons to be learned from these experiences in other countries in terms of the ability to entrench transformative environmental protections via constitutional hierarchies and the potential for the rights and interests of humans to be both an enabler of, as well as a threat to, nature's rights.

Identifiers

DOI

10.31235/osf.io/e5npr

OPENALEX

W4210884325

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::3cf8aa9cb2372a445f68f571f4cbf515

Documentary context

Documentary family

Working paper

Source-reported types

Article · preprint

Jurisdictions studied — explicit sources

MX · US

Natural entities mentioned

River · Lake

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/e5npr
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4210884325

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1583020041 · CITES
• Towards an ecological philosophy of law: a comparative discussion · CITES
• openalex:w2034575091 · CITES
• openalex:w2136326063 · CITES
• openalex:w2620857337 · CITES
• openalex:w2741363222 · CITES
• openalex:w2768498739 · CITES
• Can You Hear the Rivers Sing? Legal Personhood, Ontology, and the Nitty-Gritty of Governance · CITES
• openalex:w3123242121 · CITES
• openalex:w6609072712 · CITES

22 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Documentary validated

Library

This identity is not yet included in the Legal Library.